Spin Cycle

Marketing the private sector

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
2/26/07
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp
 

For the past six weeks, I’ve been tuning into the Canadian Broadcasting Radio One Sundays at 11 AM local time to catch an excellent series called “Spin Cycle.” The entire audio of the series is available. The series is described by CBC as “a series about spin, the spinners and the spun by Ira Basen for CBC Radio's The Sunday Edition.”

It starts with the history of what is now called “spin,” the innocuous efforts to deal with reporters not by avoiding them, but by making certain that your side of the story gets out there. The series follows the developing nature of spin into both a science and a pervasive factor in western society, to the point where nearly all politicians utter nothing but prefabricated platitudes – spin – when they deal with the media at all, and even try to supplant the media with their own information machines.

The Basen series revolves around the question, “How did we get from there to here?” Spin started out as encouraging public disclosure, in order to ensure that one’s own side of a major story, such as a train wreck or a mine disaster, got told. Prior to that, corporations simply tried to conceal such stories from the media, and the public. Now companies would seek out the press, and say, “Yes, this happened, this is how we think it happened, and here’s what we’re doing about it.” It was good public relations, and served the public interest.

Now it has turned malignant; not only is it pervasive, but it has gone from exposition to disinformation campaigns and even flat-out lying. Much of it is designed to counter the public interest, and its objective is not to inform the press, but rather to nullify the press.

The series points at two confluences that brought us to this juncture. The first was the developing science of marketing. Much of the first hour is devoted to studying Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee, the men who basically took advertising and turned it into the half-science, half-art of marketing. Marketing took public relations from what the public needed to hear to what they thought the public wanted to hear, soothing words that would entice people to buy their products. Stories, particularly of the brilliant Bernays, are widespread. He began a marketing campaign to glamorize the color green among women in order to foster the sales of menthol cigarettes. Women in the 1930s, you see, were keen on matching ensembles, and Bernays figured it would be cheaper to change their taste in color than it would be to change the color of the cigarette packs. Events showed he was right. From Bernays (who came to be appalled by the monster he had created before his death in 1995 at the age of 103) came mergers of social psychology, the use of focus groups, and the science of polling.

Marketing is a “soft science” and as a result it technically can’t be called a science at all. There are factors that cannot be measured, and it’s those indeterminate variables that make marketing somewhat unreliable and inexact, and it’s why we see colossal flops at the box office or on the roll-out of much-heralded new products (“New Coke”, anyone?). But marketeers sold THEMSELVES as being effective and largely infallible to anxious corporations, and eventually to even more anxious politicians. Nixon’s performance in the debate with Kennedy (a debate, incidently, that he actually won) caused marketers to point out what could happen to a man who didn’t have a good PR firm looking out for him. Had Nixon had a PR man to give him a closer shave and apply a little base around the eyes, American history might have been different. Now we’re in a crazed spiral in which marketers charge more and more for their services, and corporations, celebrities, and politicians see the escalating costs of such as proof that they must be terribly important to the success of companies and office-seekers. It’s expected that the presidential campaigns this cycle will exceed one billion dollars, or four days in Iraq, and most of that cost will be in marketing – advertising, selecting just the right campaign colors and ensembles for the candidates. Obviously, not much of that is going to go toward telling the voters just what the individuals will actually be like as presidents if elected.

The other element that Basen identifies in the darkening of marketing he summed up in two words: Margaret Thatcher. This will come as a surprise to most American conservatives and right wingers, but Ronald Reagan wasn’t the first private-market advocate: Maggie the Iron Hen was. Thatcher set out to privatize everything she could in Britain, which is why you read about terrible and often deadly train service these days, and why Britain’s economy had the blind staggers all through the nineties.

One reason government, both in the UK and here, was such an easy target for the free marketeers is that it didn’t market itself. Had British Rail run lots of adverts saying “99% on-time schedule and we haven’t pancaked into any lorries in a donkey’s age!” they wouldn’t have been such a juicy target for marketeers who extolled their own unproven reliability and falsely claimed that an on-time train service in Britain was as rare as a nice day in the Shetlands.

So private-sector types took over both governments, and started turning government into a marketing enterprise. But one of the nasty little secrets about the capitalistic system is that it isn’t really suited for taking social services and putting them on a for-profit basis. Given that private companies aren’t much more efficient than the government to begin with (and studies show that most major corporations are worse, due to fraud, incompetence and bureaucratic inertia), you can’t provide the same deal with a 30% markup for the same service without it costing more. Therefore private sector is often less efficient and always more expensive.

Another factor is that marketing costs money. People are gasping at the thought of a billion dollar presidentical-type campaign, but the fact is that it is a drop in the bucket compared to what the nation as a whole spends on marketing already. Soft drink companies will cheerfully shell out that much just to have a panel of experts advise them on what color cans are likely to most augment soda sales. And, as with the candidates, they won’t give a thought as to whether the contents make the purchase worthwhile.

Having a government market itself isn’t new, of course. Germany modernized the process in the 1930s, and the Soviet Union learned to adapt it to mass media. We used to sneer at what was called propaganda (which it was) and thus “propaganda” is a word government marketers turn themselves inside out trying to avoid. However, It IS propaganda, and the only difference between it and the propaganda of Goebbels is that we’ve since learned how to market the concept of propaganda as well as the propaganda itself.

Where the real malignancy came in was when the tobacco industry started forming pseudo-scientific groups to “take an even-handed analysis of the health factors of smoking.” That is where the malicious practice of deliberate disinformation in order to muddy public opinion began, and that’s why you have groups committed to lying to the public, such as Fox News, The Greening Earth Society, and the Swift Boat Veterans for Freedom. They exist to raise doubts about factual information if they can, and to flat-out lie to the public if they can’t. Fox even went to court to win the right to lie to the public as they saw fit. (Note: If you haven’t seen “Thank You For Smoking” run out and rent a copy right now.)

But there is hope. Basen, in his final installment, interviews George Pitcher, a PR man turned Anglican Priest, who has written a book called “The Death of Spin.” Pitcher believes that as PR is employed by more and more fringe groups for more and more lunatic purposes, the “spin culture” will run its course.

My own take is that we are seeing the innermost dirty little secret of marketing, the thing that, for many purposes, makes it a colossal waste of money and sometimes even a con job. If the product is utter crap, no amount of marketing in the world can save it. And privatization, shallow prepackaged politicians, and government propaganda are all crap products.

The public is beginning to notice. They are also fed up with the ceaseless barrage of advertising and the endless euphemisms of politicians and PR flaks “managing” the public.

So I think Pitcher is right, if only for slightly different reasons. The Spin Cycle is nearly finished.

Now we can take the PR flaks and hang them out to dry.